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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you a look at an inexpensive alternative to Adobe
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products, a piece of software called PhotoWorks. Now, I know that a number of you in my audience
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are somewhat opposed to Adobe's model of doing a subscription. You want to own your software
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and I get that. I personally am not put off by Adobe's model, but I understand there's a
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lot of you that are. So periodically when I come across a piece of software that might work
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particularly for those of you that maybe don't need everything that Photoshop has to offer
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for example, but you would like a lot of that functionality replicated, PhotoWorks might be a
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good option for you, particularly if you're on a tight budget. So let's jump in and let me give
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you a demonstration of the features and how the software works. Let's go ahead. Okay, here's the
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splash screen that you're going to see when you open up PhotoWorks. And I do just want to highlight
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one thing. There is no library module at this point and so you're going to open your photo
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either by dragging and dropping or clicking here to open. And so why don't we'll go ahead and do
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that and we'll take a look at first photo. I'm going to demonstrate about five different photos
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for you here just to highlight different aspects of the software. So once you've opened a photo in
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there you're going to start off on the enhancement tab and as you can see there are a few different
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tabs here that you can choose from. I will also note that much like Microsoft Office products
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there is a bar up here where you can actually search for a specific tool. So that's handy there
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So first of all, you've got a auto correction that you can do here. And one thing that I really like
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is that all of these various presets and functionalities, if it's a preset type thing
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like this, you have a slider to control the degree of how much you actually apply it
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Also, if you click down here on this icon, you can go to a split window, and so you can
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see your before and your after of what you have done. So down here below here, you can see you've got some basic tools to adjust things, much
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like what you would in Lightroom. Up at the top here, you've got your histogram
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You've also got some basic EXIF information, not too specific because there are no lens
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camera profiles here. And so you've got your ISO setting, you've got your focal length, and then your aperture value
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And over here is your shutter speed. This is actually a 15 second exposure, which is why it shows up as it does
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If you click on the colors tab here, you've got three different windows you can access
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which are HSL, hue, saturation, luminance, and you have as much finite control here
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as what you would actually in Lightroom, even a hair more, because you can actually break it on down
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by lights and darks in each one. Beyond that, you also have ability to sharpen
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and always, if you click on this right here, you can actually, you know
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you can take a look at how much sharpening you're applying. The other thing too is that if you have a mouse
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as I do that has a scroll wheel on it, you can easily scroll in and out
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And so in this case, we can see adding a little bit of sharpening has actually added clarity without adding any kind of additional noise And so it been a positive thing there Now the other thing I want to demonstrate here is that if we click over on the effects tab this is one of my favorite things
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about Photoworks in that you've actually got a ton of different presets and again as I mentioned
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before with all of these presets you have the option of if you click on it you can then you
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know, drag down the amount of effect. And so, you know, it's all scalable. And so that's a really
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nice thing. But what this, this, these are broken down into a variety of different groups. The
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popular effects kind of picks, you know, obviously the popular ones from each one, but then you've
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got, you've got a lot of different vintage looks and, you know, and so the, this may or may not
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work for your style, but you know, some of these things are pretty cool. And if it's a little too
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much. I mean, obviously you can drag it down and you can have a little bit less of an effect there
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Quick enhancements, you can add a lot of different options there. Toning effects, this will allow you
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to, you know, you can go for some more, you know, kind of hardcore type of looks there, you know
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and if I drag that down a little bit, you know, I might get a, you know, a little bit more subtle
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type result, but lots of different options under that. Lighting effects, these are mostly like
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things like overlays, like light leaks and things like that. Photographic films is probably my
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favorite. And there's a lot of great looks in here. Kodak, some Fujifilm and Polaroid, different
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options. So, you know, some of my favorites that are there, you know, like I've always liked the
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real look. Another one that, you know, at least for this particular image that I think
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works kind of nice as the Fuji blue, kind of a cool effect
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particularly if I just reduce the effect a little bit more. So some really cool options when it comes to emulations
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Finally, there are movie effects that kind of imitate the look from certain popular films
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that have a really particular look to them. And so a lot of different options of ways
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that you can tweak images under the effects category. Now, when you open up a photo that you've edited before
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as I'm doing here, It will ask you if you want to continue where you kind of left off or if you want to kind of start fresh
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And so in this case, I'll start fresh, but cool that it actually remembers that
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So I mean, obviously here, if I click the auto correction, that makes a nice positive change to the image
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But what I'm really going to focus on here is highlighting a couple of options for straightening this horizon
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which, as you can see, is somewhat crooked. so in the case of the the crop tab here tab here first of all there's a lot of different profiles
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including some useful ones like Facebook cover photo and then you can go to custom proportions
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then also you have the ability to do a rotation here and so you can either use a slider
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or you can just actually input a value and so if you add in that value here you know since I
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I already know what's required here. And then you can go ahead and apply that
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and you can straighten out that horizon. And so a nice option there
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Another option is you can go into geometry. Now, as I mentioned, it doesn't have actual profiles for a particular
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a camera or a lens profile but you can impact distortion all of those kind of things through manual settings you can also use a rotation here and and so you can affect it
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through that as well now while this is not the kind of image that you're going to remove a
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background from I did just want to click and show you this that it does have some it's obviously
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not going to be as robust as what photoshop has but particularly if you have an image that has a
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fairly, you know, a fairly clean cutout of a shape. You actually have, as you can see in its
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demonstration, you have some capability of layering in to where you can add a different background
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And so, you know, there is some Photoshop functionality built into it, obviously on a very
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you know, a much smaller scale, however. Now on this image, it's a great looking image, but I
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wanted to show you some of the retouch options that you would apply here. And so, you know, for one
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thing down here you have got three different options where if you want to do individual type
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brushing so you've got you can do tone mapping you can do individualized sharpening then beyond
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that you could also use a graduated filter either you know here with your sharpness and then also
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some of these basic tools and you can do something similar with a radial filter you know a circular
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filter to affect the image what I wanted to also highlight here is you have a couple of options for
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removing things that you don't want. There is a clone stamp option, and then there is a healing
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brush. In this case, healing brush is probably the simplest approach. And so you can actually just go
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and let's say that I wanted to eliminate this lone runner here. I could click on that and just kind
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of paint in the area I want removed. And as you can see, it has eliminated that. And so now the eye
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can just focus on this here. And then you have the option to either cancel or reset or to apply
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that to the image. Now sometimes you're shooting at higher ISO settings and one of the new tools
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that is here in Photoworks is the ability to deal with digital noise and so if you want to do some
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noise reduction. So first of all I mean you can put this box wherever you want to kind of focus
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on different aspects of where you might want to eliminate some noise. I'm just going to use this
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kind of solid black area because it shows the noise that is there. Now my personal take on noise
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reduction is that little is more. So, I mean, I prefer to use very small amounts of noise reduction
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because I feel like overdoing it causes a smoothing effect that is somewhat destructive to images
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So you have a few options. You can either use the slider, you can go up or down, or you can
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actually punch in a value. But as you can see, if we go here and we look at a split screen
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you can see that if we zoom in here you can actually see that we've eliminated some of the look of the grain and we have smoothed things out
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And so just note that when you use noise reduction it can sometimes come at the cost of a little bit of detail
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In this case I've used a small amount and it hasn't negatively impacted the image too much
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but just note that you have to be careful with how extreme you go with that
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At this point, this is the feature that seems to take the most processing power
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of this software and so your mileage will vary depending on how large the photo is and obviously what kind of processing power you got in your computer Now the final thing that I want to demonstrate to you is to take a look at your portrait options here
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Now, first of all, I mean, just clicking on auto correction actually is not a bad look here
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As you can see, it's definitely increased kind of the pop to the image. But beyond that, let's also take a look here under the retouch tab
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So if you click on portrait magic, the first thing it's going to do is it's going to highlight right in on the face
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And then it's going to open up a number of preset type options. And so as you can see, I actually like what it's done already to this image
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It's done a lot of the things that I would probably want to do to it
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But I do want to just kind of point out a few other options here
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So if I click on like this light tan option, you can see it's going to do a little bit of extra warmth to the skin tones
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But what's cool is that if you go under the custom settings, with all of these things, for example, with skin tone, you have options of really kind of digging in deep with eyes, eyebrows, lips, teeth
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You've got a lot of different options on how to actually tweak images
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But let's say if I click apply here and we come back out, we can see that we've already made a really significant improvement
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And so if you're looking for, you know, either a quick fix or software that doesn't cost you a lot to dive into doing your portrait work, you know, that's pretty sweet right there
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Finally, I want to highlight what may be the best part of this of all, in that it's a fairly robust piece of software, but pricing is really, really inexpensive for it
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And so if you use, you know, you can kind of depend on three different levels depending on what functionality that you need
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but I mean clearly a lot of this stuff I mean we've we've been looking at the pro which is you
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know the most robust version but even the most robust version is 40 bucks for it and so when
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you look at the price of what competing software is it's certainly a really really inexpensive
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piece of software and you know this is lifetime ownership with updates and support and so you know
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pretty good bang for the buck. So as you can see, there is a lot of functionality built into the
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software, a lot of different options that are there for really a quite an inexpensive price
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And so for, you know, around a $40 investment, you can have a piece of software that while the
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there is some, some overlap maybe in the functionality between Photoworks and Lightroom
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for example. At the same time, there are some things that Photoworks does that Lightroom does
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not and vice versa. But in terms of the interface, it's very similar to a Lightroom type interface
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pretty easy to pick up and learn and with a, you know, not all that steep of a learning curve. So
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it might be a nice alternative for you. And if you want to check it out, I'll throw linkage to
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access that website that I just showed you and so that you can look at ordering the software for
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yourself. And of course, you can also find linkage in the description to follow me on social media
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including now on Instagram. You can become a patron and help to support what I'm doing
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And beyond that, you can sign up for my newsletter. And if you haven't already, please click that subscribe button right here on YouTube
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Thanks for watching. Have a great day
